Speed-dialing, i.e., dialing a predetermined phone number by pressing just a speed-dial key or short key-sequence, is well known in the art. In particular, it is well known to set up speed-dial keys or key-sequences for dialing specific emergency phone numbers to request a response to different, respective local emergency-response services, e.g., police, fire, and ambulance services. Speed-dialing is typically configured on each individual phone by its user.
A different, but more centralized approach to speed-dialing emergency phone numbers is to have a common, short sequence of digits that can be dialed from any phone in a large service area for that phone number, even though different local emergency responders will be contacted, depending on the location of the caller. (Such an emergency phone number may also be universal in the sense that it can be used to request a response to any of a wide variety of emergencies.) Such universal emergency phone numbers vary from geographic region to region. For example, 9-1-1 is used in most of the United States and Canada, while 1-1-2 is used throughout the European Union.
It is known in the art to pre-program a mobile communication device, such as a smart phone, to provide the user an option, perhaps even from a “locked” state (wherein the device has substantially all functionality disabled), to speed-dial such an emergency phone number. Moreover, it is known to pre-program (or update) the device to correctly dial whatever emergency phone number is appropriate for the region from which the caller is dialing. Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/048,766 filed Feb. 3, 2005, and published Aug. 3, 2006, as U.S. 2006/0172720 A1 teaches inter alia the use of a coarse-grained geographic indicator to select the appropriate emergency phone number in a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/625,121 filed Feb. 15, 2007, and published Aug. 21, 2008, as U.S. 2008/0200142 A1 teaches similarly for a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) emergency phone call.
The known art teaches only solutions directed to contacting civil emergency-response services. Emergency phone calls are commonly routed to a centralized call-centre or dispatch-centre. For example, in the United States, a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) may serve an entire county. PSAP operators then forward requests for emergency-response services to different responders depending on the nature and location of the emergency. The caller's fine-grained location, typically indicated as an address, can usually be determined—in case the caller cannot communicate it—even if the emergency phone call is placed from a mobile communication device. Thus, the fine-grained location of the caller can be determined after the emergency phone call is made.
An enterprise environment presents opportunities for emergency response that is more fine-grained and, therefore, more immediate. The enterprise may have its own (or contracted) security personnel who are on site and can respond much more quickly to certain type of emergencies than civil responders can. Moreover, certain types of emergencies are only of concern to the enterprise or are preferably kept private. For example, a case of insider corporate espionage might be something that the enterprise desires to keep as an internal manner, to avoid publicity. For these two reasons, it would be desirable to call corporate security, rather than civil responders.
Furthermore, the enterprise may be organized to have “regular” employees (as opposed to dedicated security personnel) trained for and tasked with responding to first-aid emergencies. Such first-aid providers would likely be more numerous and distributed as a finer-mesh safety net (probably at least one qualified first-aid provider per building or floor within a building) than dedicated security personnel, who may not be in every building or may be roaming. So in some circumstances, it would be better to call a particular co-worker than the main corporate security phone number. Typically, each such employee would have a different phone number or extension; the intended area for that employee to provide first-aid service would be the “service area” for his or her phone number or extension, viewed as an emergency phone number.
However, such a fine-grained approach to emergency-response service presents a new problem: how to determine the location of a calling device precisely enough—before the emergency phone call is placed—so that the correct emergency phone number is dialed. The previously mentioned prior-art techniques for determining the location of a device before it makes an emergency phone call have only determined the country or region in which the emergency phone call is being made. The location-determining methods of those solutions rely on information provided from the cellular or VoIP system being used to make the emergency phone call.
Other resources, unrelated to the calling system, can potentially be used to determine a device's location before it places a phone call. A mobile communication device may be able to determine some information about its location from the wireless access point through which it is accessing a voice/data network other the network used for phone communication. An example would be a Wi-Fi access point. But a single wireless access point may serve several buildings, making it impossible to target a phone call to one specific first-aid provider. Even triangulation of signals from wireless access points is designed to provide first-responders with a caller's address, not a particular room on a particular floor of a building.
An obvious choice for determining position is Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which has become so prevalent that it is now common in mobile communication devices. Yet accessing GPS signals within a building can be very slow (or perhaps impossible far from windows or in a basement) and may not be accurate enough to ascertain which floor a caller is on. Moreover, even if GPS co-ordinates could reliably be determined with adequate speed and accuracy, considerable preparatory work would ne needed to map three-dimensional regions of space to target phone numbers.
Accordingly, there is a need to facilitate placing an emergency phone call from a mobile communication device to an enterprise.